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If I were Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi, I’d be slightly worried that I received a telephone call from U.S. Vice President Joe Bidenon Monday assuring continued American military support and coordination to combat ISIS. Last week, ISIS made dramatic gains by taking over the provincial capital of Ramadi without much of a fight from Iraqi official and militia forces or supporting air power from Arab and foreign countries.
Also worried should be the people of Iraq and of many Arab countries, because the combination of Arab and Western military forces fighting against ISIS seems to have produced limited results in the past year since the jihadi group started to seriously expand from its northern Syria heartland. ISIS today is among the fastest, if not the fastest, growing political movements in the Arab world. It is still expanding in parts of Iraq and Syria, and picking up adherents among smaller movements in other Arab countries and a few non-Arab countries. How is this possible, after 12 years of nonstop American-led warfare, military training, democracy promotion and state-building in Iraq?
Understanding the answers to that question strikes me as an urgent task for all Arab citizens and leaders, who are either directly menaced by ISIS and Al-Qaeda, or potentially threatened by them. I say this because so many tens of millions of disgruntled, discarded, disposable Arabs who have not found life, identity, dignity, justice or hope in their failed status as citizens now could play their last desperate card of joining ISIS, or simply waving its flag in defiance, as a tortured protest of their demeaned condition. Only some thousands here and there have done this to date. But tens of millions are potential candidates to do so if conditions in the Arab region remain the same, which seems to be the case.
The combination of American and Arab armies in action in recent years has not been very impressive or reassuring for ordinary Arab men and women who dearly seek to live a normal, plain, unexceptional life – a life that is not dominated by local and foreign attacks, terrorism, mass refugee flows, imploding governments, weakened economies, heightened sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, endemic corruption, public decapitations and flogging, and, now, the emergence of ISIS and other extreme movements like it.
So if your secretary tells you that Joe Biden is on the phone, and you live anywhere between Morocco and Bangladesh, you might do well to make sure you have an emergency travel bag packed. I say this because the likelihood of your having to flee your hometown in haste is much higher than it is for citizens in those little towns in Iowa and New Hampshire where American presidential candidates these days speak mostly gibberish about American foreign policy in the Middle East, whose consequences speak loudly in Ramadi last week.
The United States has spent trillions of dollars since 2003 and has lost thousands of dead and tens of thousands of injured – first by invading and effectively destroying the Iraqi state that had functioned for much of the previous century; then by feverishly and, it turns out, amateurishly training and equipping a new Iraqi army to replace the one it dismantled in 2003 on the orders of a real life comic strip character named Paul Bremer; and now by resuming military action in the form of more training and equipping schemes, alongside aerial attacks against ISIS. For what? By whose mandate? Perhaps this is why ISIS is the fastest growing political brand in the Arab region.
Iraqis themselves also have paid a high price in the hundreds of thousands of their citizens who have been killed by a variety of groups, including invading Anglo-American forces, other Iraqis (including state forces in some cases) motivated by ugly sectarianism, and nowadays by ISIS and similar militant Sunni purveyors of death and the destruction of long-standing Iraqi societies. Corrupt and dysfunctional Iraqi governance and ineffective armed forces in the wake of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion are a 50-50 joint venture of Iraqis and Americans working together to provide one of modern history’s most vivid examples of what should be avoided in statecraft.
What should be avoided is local dictatorships supported by foreign powers, as was Saddam Hussein’s cruel and vicious Baathist endeavor for years. This is followed by those same foreign powers attacking and dismantling the same country, as well as hapless parties trying to patch the country back together again with harebrained schemes concocted by ignorant and totally unaccountable throwback colonial-style administrators.
So I would find a desk to hide under, or a nearby ferryboat to India or Greece, if Joe Biden calls soon. It would be much healthier for Arabs and Americans alike to stop repeating the catastrophic policies of using force to resolve local tensions.
The only resolution across the world has always resided in the reality of ordinary, satisfied citizens who are treated decently by their own authorities and foreign powers alike.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR. He can be followed on Twitter @RamiKhouri.
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